IP Conflict

Hi All,
My company uses static IP addressing. We are having issues of IP conflicts reported by a users. If i issue a ping command "ping -a 10.10.12.2" it will reply with a particular hostname. And if i issue the command with same IP address using another system it will reply with a different hostname. I traced the second hostname and discovered that its using a different IP address but yet the first hostname still reporting IP conflict.

Not many people realize it, but your local network uses MAC addresses to communicate. Therefore, an IP address has to be converted to a MAC address, and this is done by the ARP table. Each node on the network advertises it's presence and gets added to the table. If more than one advertises the same IP address, you get a conflict. In Windows, the table can be viewed with the Command "arp -a".